Sunday Island mission was established on the Jawi island of Iwanyi (Sunday Island) in 1899. Originally established as a non-denominational mission by the pearler Sydney Hadley, it was taken over by the United Aborigines Mission in 1923, and, with the exception of an unsuccessful relocation attempt to Wotjulum on the eastern side of the King Sound (1934–5), remained operational at the island until 1962. Following its closure, most of the Jawi and Bardi people who had lived at the island moved to Derby, where their children had been relocated in order to attend school. In 1972, without government assistance, they returned to the Dampier Peninsula where they established the community of One Arm Point on the Bardi mainland. Also on the mainland, the Pallottine order of the Catholic Church set up Lombadina mission in 1910, which is today a secular Aboriginal community. (Djarindjin Aboriginal community, established in the 1980s, is situated immediately adjacent to Lombadina). Prior to the establishment of the missions in Bardi and Jawi country, the discovery of rich pearling grounds had brought pearling fleets into the area from the early 1880s, and interactions with the pearlers constitutes the beginning of sustained contact with Europeans in this region.
From the earliest days of colonial contact, missionaries and other Europeans who lived in close proximity to Bardi and Jawi peoples made distinctions between some cultural practices (which were considered acceptable) as against others (which were not). During the early period of the United Aborigines Mission at Sunday Island, for example, the missionaries opposed overtly different cultural practices (various initiatory rites, tooth evulsion, cicatrisation, junior levirate marriage, traditional burial practices and so on) and sought to transform indigenous belief as well as practice (Glaskin 2002: 92–6).
Some aspects of Bardi culture also became objects of interest and attention during the early days of missionary operations in this region. Father Nicholas Emo, who began a short-lived mission at Disaster Bay and later worked at Lombadina mission, was ‘a keen collector of native weapons and other tribal artefacts … and the Dampierlanders, warming to his interest, had gladly bartered their handiwork for tobacco, sugar and tea’ (Durack 1997: 220). Emo took notes on the ‘customs’ of both Nyul Nyul in the Beagle Bay area and Bard[6] at Lombadina, and sought to identify marriage rules and kinship terms.[7] Father Worms, a missionary at Lombadina between 1931 and 1955, wrote numerous articles on various aspects of Bard society and culture, showing that he had an active interest in these matters.[8]
The Western Australian government also had an interest in certain aspects of Aboriginal culture. In 1904, they produced a blank workbook[9] and distributed it to those working with Indigenous people in Western Australia. Most of the workbook, entitled ‘Native Vocabulary etc., compiled by [blank to be filled out]’, calls for vocabulary, but at the back of the workbook there is some space (pp. 87–97) for ‘questions’. Among the questions in the back of the workbooks were the following:
Question 5: Native modes of burial in the district?
Question 8: Game traps (kangaroo, emu, etc.), other methods of capture, description of?
Question 14: Legends, songs, and folklore (if any); legend of ‘Bunnyar’?
Question 16: Extent of tribal country, and approximate number of natives in the district?
Question 17: Native names of tribes in the district?
Question 20: Do the tribes meet at any distant places for exchange or barter?
Question 23: Is cannibalism known to exist in the district?
Question 26: Any idea of a deity?
Question 27: Native beliefs in ghosts, or a future state?
Question 28: What beliefs have the natives in witchcraft, sorcery; and is there a ‘boyl-ya’ or sorcerer among the tribes in the district?
Both Sydney Hadley and W. H. Bird filled out these workbooks[10] with respect to ‘the natives’ at Sunday Island mission. Bird’s published accounts of Jawi language and ‘customs’ were based on the information in these books.[11] The production and distribution of the workbook by the Western Australian government indicates that they were, in some fashion, interested in collating material that could be potentially useful in their governance of Aboriginal people.
Various objects and practices were also imbued with a commercial dimension following colonisation and engagement with the capitalist state. In the early days of the pearling industry, Bardi and Jawi traded artefacts (as they had done traditionally with other Aborigines) and resources (such as water and knowledge of where to find water) with pearling crews in exchange for introduced objects (like tobacco, flour, tea and alcohol). Sunday Island missionaries used Bardi and Jawi labour to harvest pearl shell, trepang, tortoise shell and trochus shell in order to sustain the mission economically. In this respect they were reliant not just on labour but on Bardi and Jawi knowledge of the marine environment, and on their navigational and sea-faring skills. Lombadina missionaries sought to capitalise on ‘traditional’ skills evident in artefact manufacture, teaching handicrafts at the mission for some years prior to World War II. When servicemen were stationed at Cape Leveque during the war, Lombadina residents traded wood-carvings and pearl shell ornaments with them (Robinson 1973: 173). In the 1960s, under the direction of the missionaries, Lombadina residents manufactured boomerangs for sale to boost the mission economy.[12]
The focused attention upon certain aspects of their society, in connection with various legislation, economic, technological and other changes arising from colonial encounters, are significant components of the conjunctural field in which Bardi and Jawi objectifications of some cultural elements have emerged post-colonisation. These objectifications have typically concentrated on outward, observable cultural forms, not on the ‘inner workings’ of a system of land and sea ownership. Indeed, in Australia as in other colonised countries, European powers justified their colonisation of indigenous peoples and the appropriation of their lands on a basis that was directly antithetical to such investigations: namely, that indigenous peoples were considered too ‘primitive’ to have had property laws or institutions of governance (Culhane 1998: 31). Hence Aboriginal property relations, while of research interest to some, have not been subjected to the kind of wholesale elucidation that engagement with native title processes has elicited, in which principles of inheritance, succession, rights and interests, boundaries, genealogies, and so on, are objectified for the purposes of interrogating whether native title can be recognised, and to what degree.[13]
Among Bardi and Jawi, it is the case that certain missionaries and anthropologists in the region have been interested in some less overt aspects of their ‘culture’. The effects of these interventions, however, are distinct from those engendered by engagement with the native title process. In the latter, the communal emphasis of native title means that a broader socio-territorial group (not the individual) has been required to objectify their property relations in terms of ‘traditional laws and customs’: to articulate the ‘rules’ by which people are connected to country, by which they may succeed to it, and to elaborate on the kinds of rights and obligations that flow from their connection to country. While the elaboration of laws and customs that give rise to rights and interests in land is somewhat analogous to describing the external authority of ‘the Law’, these objectifications differ from those regarding ‘the Law’, both in kind—through stimulating explicit claims concerning individual or family group affiliations to publicly be made—and in terms of the conditions under which such objectifications occur—in response to the requirements of the NTA and in contexts where non-Indigenous people will test and adjudicate these claims regarding relations to country.